Working independently in the field of brain research,
Stanford neurophysiologist
Karl Pribram has also become persuaded of the holographic nature
of reality.
Pribram was drawn to the holographic model by the puzzle of how
and where
memories are stored in the brain. For decades numerous studies have
shown
that rather than being confined to a specific location, memories
are dispersed
throughout the brain. In a series of landmark experiments in the
1920s, brain
scientist Karl Lashley found that no matter what portion of a rat's brain
he removed
he was unable to eradicate its memory of how to perform complex tasks it
had
learned prior to surgery . The only problem was that
no one was able to come
up with a mechanism that might explain this curious "whole in every part"
nature
of memory storage. Then in the 1960s Pribram encountered the
concept of
holography and realized he had found the explanation brain scientists
had been looking for.

It seemed immediately plausible that the distributed memory of the brain
might resemble this holographic record. I developed a precisely formulated
theory based on known neuroantanomy and known neurophysiology that
could account for the brain’s memory store in holographic terms. In a dozen
or so years since, many laboratories including my own have provided
evidence in support of parts of this theory.

Pribram's theory also explains how the human brain can store so many
memories in so little space. It has been estimated that the
human brain has
the capacity to memorize something on the order of 10 billion bits
of information
during the average human lifetime (or roughly the same amount of information
contained in five sets of the Encyclopaedia Britannica). Our
uncanny ability
to quickly retrieve whatever information we need from the enormous store
of
our memories becomes more understandable if the brain functions according
to holographic principles. Similarly, it is more understandable how
the brain
is able to translate the avalanche of frequencies it receives via the senses
(light
frequencies, sound frequencies, and so on) into the concrete world
of our
perceptions.
But the most mind-boggling aspect of Pribram's holographic model of the
brain is what happens when it is put together with Bohm's theory.
For if
the concreteness of the world is but a secondary reality and what is "there"
is actually a holographic blur of frequencies, and if the brain is
also a hologram
and only selects some of the frequencies out of this blur and mathematically
transforms them into sensory perceptions, what becomes of objective reality?
Put quite simply, it ceases to exist. As the religions of
the East have long upheld,
the material world is Maya, an illusion, and although we may think we are
physical
beings moving through a physical world, this too is an illusion.
We are really
"receivers" floating through a kaleidoscopic sea of frequency, and what
we extract
from this sea and transmogrify into physical reality is but one channel
from many
extracted out of the superhologram. This striking new picture
of reality, the
synthesis of Bohm and Pribram's views, has come to be called the holographic
paradigm, and although many scientists have greeted it with skepticism,
it has
galvanized others. A small but growing group of researchers believe
it may be
the most accurate model of reality science has arrived at thus far.
More than that,
some believe it may solve some mysteries that have never before been
explainable
by science and even establish the paranormal as a part of nature.
Numerous
researchers, including Bohm and Pribram, have noted that many parapsychological
phenomena become much more understandable in terms of the holographic
paradigm.
In a universe in which individual brains are actually indivisible
portions of the
greater hologram and everything is infinitely interconnected, telepathy
may
merely be the accessing of the holographic level. It is obviously
much easier
to understand how information can travel from the mind of individual
'A' to that
of individual 'B' at a far distance point, and helps to understand
a number of
unsolved puzzles in psychology. In particular, Transpersonal psychologist
Stanislav Grof feels the holographic paradigm offers a model for understanding
many of the baffling phenomena experienced by individuals during
altered states
of consciousness. He had patients who appeared to tap into some sort
of
collective or racial unconscious. Individuals with little or no education
suddenly
gave detailed descriptions of Zoroastrian funerary practices and scenes
from
Hindu mythology. In other categories of experience, individuals gave
persuasive accounts of out-of-body journeys, of precognitive glimpses
of the future, of regressions into apparent past-life incarnations.

His monograph Brain Mechanisms and Intelligence (1929) contained
two significant principles: mass action and equipotentiality. Mass action
postulates that certain types of learning are mediated by the cerebral cortex
(the convoluted outer layer of the cerebrum) as a whole, contrary to the
view that every psychological function is localized at a specific place on
the cortex. Equipotentiality, associated chiefly with sensory systems such
as the visual, relates to the finding that some parts of a system take over
the functions of other parts. [Encl. Brittanica]
Karl Pribram: “What the fuss is all about.” in The Holographic Paradigm,
ed. Ken Wilbur, 1982. p.33